Tales of things eaten & made in Brooklyn and beyond

obama brew. part two.

Our batch of White House Honey Porter is bubbling along beautifully in the living room. We put in the airlock after two days on the blow off tube and no explosions! We’re making progress here.

It’s been 13 days since we brewed our batch of homebrew, and now it’s time to bottle for stage two fermentation and conditioning. We pulled out our great recipe from Bitter and Esters and got to work.

(Thanks to Tusia for the help and photography!)

white house honey porter. part two.

Step one: Figure out how many bottles you’ll need (5 gallons = 48 12 oz bottles) and collect them. Dark brown or green glass is preferable, and, keep in mind that beer bottles that came with corks (like some fancy large bottles of Belgium brew) don’t take a normal cap, so count them out. (We were short a few bottles, so we called upon our neighbors to share some of their recycling. And they did!)

Step two: Sanitize your bottles, bottle caps, siphoning tubes & bottling bucket. If you have a dishwasher (lucky) use it for the bottles. If not, sanitize your bottles and the rest in the bottling bucket itself. Our trick here is to fill the bottling bucket with sanitizer, submerge a few bottles, mouth up, in the bucket, let them fill with sanitized water (they’re full when they stop bubbling), and set them aside for a few minutes minutes. When you’re ready to dump them out, pour the sanitized water back into the bottling bucket to use again.

Step three: Boil 4 oz of corn sugar in 2 cups of water. Set aside to cool to 70F.

Step four: Add priming sugar to the bottling bucket, then siphon your beer from carboy to bottling bucket. Leave the sludge behind! Check out this great info-pic which breaks it down for you, and this YouTube video, which gives you a trick for siphoning without fancy equipment. Keep some paper towels on hand. It gets a little messy! And sticky! (Especially with all that honey.)

Step five: Bottle!

Step six: Cap!

Step seven: Store the bottles away somewhere dark and warm, and let them carbonate for another two weeks. Then, chill them in the fridge for a third week to finish them off!